The bird just watched her.

“All right. All right.” Livira set the scrap down on the book’s cover, not sure that she would leave it but prepared to test herself and see how it felt. Actually, it felt a lot better than being pursued by a screeching raven for the next few miles. “There! Happy?”

Livira turned to go.

“SQUAWK!”

“Oh, come on!” Livira turned back slowly. “I can’t leave with the corner. I can’t leave without it. I can’t open the book...”

With a grunt of effort, she picked up the book and the scrap together. She walked away, already feeling the strain in her arms. The raven followed. “Really? This is what you want?”

With a burst of energy, the bird got ahead of her, a guide once more. At the next turning it veered to the left.

“It’s this way back.” Livira nodded to the book she’d set on the floor to indicate the way. “You’re just going to yell at me if I go that way, aren’t you?”

Livira followed the bird, abandoning the return path. An image of raven wings poking out from beneath the heavy tome bubbled up unbidden from the undercurrent of her thoughts. It wasn’t something she wanted to do. But then again neither were any of the alternatives. She followed, labouring beneath her burden, pushing the ethics of the situation around in her mind. She had to admit that if a crow had landed among the bean rows at the settlement, she would have immediately taken any opportunity to kill it. A crow livened up bean soup considerably. Most things did.

She’d kill a crow if she were hungry. This thing wasn’t even properly alive. It was cogs and wire or some such cleverness. But it was also more than a regular crow or raven. And not only was it possessed of the intelligence to navigate the library with purpose, it was old beyond knowing, something precious, made with lost lore, bound with secrets. Flattening it beneath a book merely to escape the irritation of its scolding seemed... Livira couldn’t find the word, but whatever the word was it was slowly turning into “necessary” with each passing step.

“I can’t do this.” Livira dropped the book. It hit the floor flat with a shockingly loud slap. She stuffed the scrap in her pocket and rubbed her aching biceps. She looked to see what her guide would do, but something further down the aisle caught her eye. Some object on the floor a hundred yards past the raven. A thing that wasn’t a book. And more than that, there was an oddness going on with the shelves beside it. Something her eyes couldn’t make sense of. She started forward.

“SQUAWK!”

“Gods DAMN you, bird!” Livira picked up the book and hurried forward with it hugged to her chest once more.

The object on the ground was a person, or rather something made in the shape of a person. She was, like the metal man at the second door, an imitation, but this time in grey stone, the same grey stone that the floor and walls were made of. There were no indications of joints—she could be a statue, if the sculptor had chosen to carve her face down to the floor as if she had collapsed, head to one side, one arm outstretched. The outstretched arm led to the second thing that was perhaps still more strange. A circle of shimmering light that stood almost as if it were a doorway into the shelves. It was taller than Livira could reach but not much. The grey woman’s hand stretched towards the light, her fingers not quite making contact.

Livira knelt and set her book down. She touched the woman. Hard as stone, smooth, slightly cold. She had been made, or carved, with insufficient detail to convince anyone that she was real. She wore no clothes but didn’t appear to have anything to hide. Her hair wasn’t hair, just the shape of it around her head, ignoring gravity’s pull. She appeared to be perfect in all regards save for a curious cratered wound to the side of her forehead not pressed to the ground. The indentation was no bigger than a thumbprint and maybe a third of an inch deep.

“Who is she?” Livira turned to the raven as it caught her up.

The raven hopped around the fallen woman cautiously, observing her from all angles. It made a soft cawing sound at the back of its throat. A mournful noise. And pecked gently at the figure’s shoulder.

“Was this where you were leading me? Can you wake her up?” Livira thought that the raven’s cry might, at full volume, wake the dead.

The raven repeated its sorrowful cawing.

Livira pursed her lips. She looked at the circle of light. The shimmers reminded her of water in a pail and the sunlight dancing across it. She knelt and studied the woman’s hand. Her fingers stretched towards the light. The circle stood flush against the shelves. What had she been reaching for? It didn’t make sense unless there was a gap behind the curtain of shimmers. Was it placed here to hide something? Perhaps a doorway had been cut through the shelves allowing access to the next aisle. Was there some secret hidden here?

Although she wasn’t generally given to caution, Livira felt that a measure of it might be called for. The woman appeared to have been felled by a blow to the head. And given that she was made of stone it must have been a remarkably hard blow. Even so, walking away from a mystery wasn’t something Livira could do. Certainly not when it had taken the breaking of many rules and the expenditure of all her stamina to find this particular mystery. She reached a hand towards the circle of light, then pulled it back. She looked at the bird.

“We should be clever about this. Use our advantages.” She withdrew the small black book from her inner pocket. “If I go through there and something chases me out it’s going to run smack into the shelves if it can’t see... But I’ll know to turn left and run.” She opened the book, and everything went black. She placed the volume on the floor. “You should stay here, bird. With her. I don’t think you’re very fast anymore. Just be careful and hide if there’s trouble.”

Now that it came to it, Livira didn’t feel like going into the light at all. She couldn’t even see it, but she knew it was there. She reached towards it.

“I’ll just feel around a bit.” She let the woman’s arm guide her own, sliding her fingers along the back of the cold stone hand. She touched the light.

“Oh.” Her fingertips met resistance. She pushed but made no progress. Setting her palm flat against the surface she began to quest for some gap in it, pushing and feeling only the slightest give. “I don’t think—” And without warning a stranger’s hand closed around hers and yanked her forwards.

... from Ectran, primarily boats fishing close to the Broken Shore. All of which suggests that rather than an invasion, what we are seeing is in fact a migration. Reliable sources west of the Thellion Confederacy are rare, but the names skour, scare, scar, and, most commonly, skeer, crop up time and again. We don’t know the nature of this foe that has driven such a vast horde of sabbers from their ancestral lands. But one can be sure that—even when we discard fanciful tales of vast white spiders devouring all they encounter—they must be implacable to make the sabbers know fear.

Intelligence report XXVI-CXX, from the desk of Lord Algar Omesta

CHAPTER 23

Evar

Evar’s fingers closed around the hand in the black pool and in a confusion of flying water he found himself on his back at the pool’s edge with a stranger on all fours beside him. A dark-maned girl, in a blue robe, gasping for air.